The Candles Smell Golden

Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I made a post! The time seemed to just kind of slip by. But I realized how long it had been when I posted my recent excursion to Yankee Candle on Instagram and thought, “I’ll put this in my post.” So, I guess the first thing I’ll write about is my excursion to Yankee Candle. I get e-mails from them with coupons sometimes, and honestly, the candles (at least the large ones) are expensive, so I don’t buy them unless I have a deal. This time I had a 50% off deal (buy $100 save $50) so I got four candles. I didn’t mean to not show the scents in the picture, but the labels just happened to be turned around in my Instagram photo:

I just learned how to embed my instagram photos in my blog, so there ya go. Kinda cool! Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get them to be centered, but I’ll work on that. My CSS inspector in my new Safari is a bit, not as friendly as I remember. Here’s a better picture where I’ve stored them:

Now, I did not buy all these scents at once. That’d be crazy! Heehee, but I have bought all of these on sale. There were some Christmas sale too, and this doesn’t include all the candles I have burning (one for each room). Yesterday I got Flowers in the Sun, Line-Dried Cotton, Golden Sands, and (for extra fun) Berrylicious. These are all pretty pleasant standard fare, except for Berrylicious, which I got for variety and extra fun. As you can see I also have Midnight Jasmine, Home for the Holidays, and a small Christmas Eve. I love Yankee Candle. Here’s what I have burning in the three parts of my apartment:

I have Catching Rays, a pretty good replacement for Lemon Lavender (my absolute favorite!), in the main room (living room/kitchen). And as you can see I have Macintosh in the bedroom, the fresh apple scent really livens up the room, now just to clean up the laundry, heehee. And in the bathroom is Soft Blanket, my new favorite. I almost got another Soft Blanket this time around, but I decided I’d go for something a little different and be adventurous so I went for Berrylicious instead.

Anyways, those are my candles!

I also unofficially finished Learning Python (I still have a little way to go) so I started the next behemoth in the series Programming Python. The first book was about 1500 pages, and this book is about 1500 pages, so… that’s a lot of Python:

And speaking of Python, I actually published my first Python package in PyPI (the Python Package Index). I’m working on porting over my phabstractic library (asherwunk/phabstractic) to Python from PHP, and one of the dependencies is zend-config (view on GitHub). So, I decided I’d port the independent parts of zend-config to Python in a package called objconfig (asherwunk/objconfig) that I was able to publish to PyPI. Here’s the link to on the package index. I was able to use the sample-project provided on GitHub to be able to format setup.py and setup.cfg (with tox.ini) properly to get it uploaded onto the index. At the time I published it I didn’t think I was able to pull off an exclusive lock on a file with Python (which the PHP library does), but it turns out I can using the os module. I’ll have to update that in the next version’s release. I’ll cover asherwunk/objconfig in some more posts in the future so you can see how I did it.

I also learned yesterday of Brython, a client-side browser scripting library that runs a version of Python 3. This allows you to use Python as you might use JavaScript in the browser. It can even integrate with other JavaScript libraries such as three.js or jQuery. This will be very handy when I start programming my phuxer client. I’ll only have to theoretically program the bulk of it in Python rather than both Python and JavaScript, and it’ll run on the desktop and the browser.

So I made a post about Pokémon after I came back, but I never really made a post about where I went. I participated in the Young Adult Program (YARMA) of the Shining Stars Foundation in Winter Park this last week or so. It was really fun. When I was 28 I participated in an experimental extension of the Shining Stars Foundation Aspen Winter Games (by experimental I mean they were experimenting with older ages and non-cancer diseases that are considered life threatening). I was the oldest one there, and this time in Winter Park, I was also the oldest one there, being 33. But, fortunately, I didn’t feel like it. All the “kids” there were great, and I felt like I was part of the group which was nice. We skied in Winter Park for three days with an instructor for free! It was awesome. Here are some pictures:

And of course the ultimate picture, me skiing with my instructor Simon (sorry Simon, looks like you got cut out):

It was really a lovely time. I hadn’t skied in five years, but, I believe I skied better in Winter Park than I did in the Aspen Winter Games. A large part of it was my instructor who really helped me take my skiing to the next level, but also the snow. The snow in Aspen had been pretty late in the season and was somewhat icey and slushy, while it was literally snowing WHILE we were skiing in Winter Park. The snow was great, and it was much easier to ski on. I really got my turns down, and in the whole escapade I only fell four times! I met some great people, and did some good workshops, particularly on my resumé. I’m hoping to do something with it soon… Starbucks, here I come!

So I made spaghetti, but I used my new spiralizer instead of making noodles. Not only was it healthier (allegedly), but it was easier to prepare than actually cooking noodles. This is what I ended up with:

When I got back from the YARMA Maus and I went to Starbucks to practice some drawing and stuff. Here’s a picture of Kadar and Howard that Maus drew in preparation for the future comic Artificial Life. I’ve yet to actually… uh… make the comic… but I’m working on it, I swear. Here’s Kadar having a little fun with Howard:

In other news, Golden Girls is now streaming on Hulu! YES! When I try to stream my games on twitch I often watch Golden Girls on my computer at the same time. Unfortunately, my DVDs are starting to get old and sometimes they mess up the DVD player. I tried running a different program than the one Apple ships with my Mac Mini (5k Video) but… it seems that whenever the DVD player messes up (it’s an external USB device) it crashes my streaming and I have to restart my computer. Now, I can stream Golden Girls in Hulu and I don’t have to worry about read errors, nor having to switch DVD discs (level up on couch potato skill +150). I love it.

I’ve been working on my Clock Tower series, and actually, in terms of videos I’m up to Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within ending rank H (in production). I’ve yet to make Game Overview posts on Clock Tower for PSX, but I’m working on it. In the mean time enjoy some 80s horror synth: